Conclusion

We’ve made a nice discovery in this roundup, namely, the Kingston V+ series with the Toshiba T6UG1XBG controller. The developers of this controller have created a small miracle. The SSD based on it managed to overtake and outperform such renowned opponents as the Intel X25-M and a number of Indilinx-based products under loads typical of home computers. It must be noted that this controller is much worse under server loads, especially if there are any write requests to be processed. Thus, the Kingston V+ series is a very good SSD for home users.

The Super Talent MasterDrive SX with Samsung controller showed all the typical traits of the latter including a satisfactory performance under server loads, average performance in desktop applications, high sequential speeds and low power consumption. We guess this SSD is going to be just fine for users who care about power saving. It will also be a good choice if you want a high speed of sequential reading/writing.

Some time ago there were rather few SSDs with the Indilinx Barefoot controller. But now there are a lot of such products, both with SLC (Super Talent UltraDrive GX FTM and ОСZ Agility EX) and MLC chips (Wintec Filemate and Super Talent UltraDrive GX FTD). It must be noted that this controller, with a large cache buffer it can make good use of, nearly eliminates any difference between SLC and MLC memory in terms of performance (the difference in service life still exists, of course). Yes, the SLC-memory models are somewhat better at processing a large number of random-address write requests but the difference is not as huge as we saw with the first-generation SSD controllers. The Indilinx-based SSDs seem to be all-purpose products capable of handling any type of load.

It is the SSDs based on the JMicron 602B controller that are no good at all. They were represented in this review by Kingston’s first-generation V series models which looked depressingly slow against their opponents.